This sympathy reflected a broader shift in Cornwell’s political affiliations. ‘Back in the nineties, being involved with Republicans was very different than it is right now,’ she said told me in 2010. ‘They had a lot of values – fiscal responsibility, smaller government, law enforcement, very pro-civil rights in many ways. Now, the Republican Party has become the morality gatekeeper of the country, and they don’t believe in the separation of church and state any more. It’s not a democracy so much as it wants to become a theocracy. And those are not the principles that this country was founded upon.’
Where her writing was concerned, this change of perception did not come without making sacrifices. Cornwell may have been painting on a broader canvas, but she dispensed with one of the more striking innovations of her early fiction: denying the reader any knowledge of the killer until the very last pages. Her early works weren’t whodunits, or even whydunnits, but how and when-dunnits that were shaped by Scarpetta’s concentration on method rather than motivation. Postmortem derives much of its unsettling effect not from providing insights into the terrifying mind of the killer, but from making the reader complicit with the increasingly paranoid speculation about who they might be. By the end, this list includes just about everyone Scarpetta encounters – including Marino for a few sentences. In this, we are aligned with the vulnerable and the victims. Cornwell’s subversion of one of crime fiction’s great consolations – the plot as a puzzle to be solved – did not meet with universal approbation. She recalls learning that one British reviewer hurled Postmortem across the room in frustration upon reaching the climax.
This denial of readers’ expectations is an inevitable consequence of narrating in the first person. ‘Unless Scarpetta knows the killer personally, you are not going to see him until the end,’ Cornwell explains. But it also evokes the terror that saturated Richmond during the reign of the Southside Strangler. The same fear that made Cornwell believe she was the next victim could also convince her that anyone might be the perpetrator. ‘The FBI once told me that the moment of recognition that someone is a violent psychopath is one minute before he kills you. You are riding in his car or having a pleasant chat on the elevator, and then the monster steps out.’
More significantly for the series as a whole, Cornwell’s shift to the third person in 2003 shepherded Scarpetta’s supporting cast into the limelight. Over the next seven years, the personal trajectories of Farinelli, Marino and Wesley often proved more extreme and dramatic than that of Scarpetta herself. No one’s personal trajectory has been more extreme or dramatic than that of Lucy Farinelli, although whether she loved being the centre of attention or despised it remains open for debate. Kay Scarpetta may be the character closest to Cornwell’s heart, but Lucy is probably the character closest to Cornwell herself.
‘I have a lot of Lucy in me,’ Cornwell acknowledges. ‘She is the troublemaker, the fiery one who lives life to the fullest. She takes risks that are not in Scarpetta’s nature to take. Lucy is always a renegade.’
Our first sighting of Lucy is as a child, disappointed that her ‘Aunt Kay’ has failed to take her to Monticello because of work. Bored, the ten-year-old teaches herself to re-format Scarpetta’s computer, much to her aunt’s dismay which quickly segues into amazement when she realises the upgrade has been accomplished perfectly. ‘Any dickhead could figure it out,’ Lucy responds nonchalantly with her soon to be characteristic ‘dirty mouth’.
She may be a child in this opening scene, but all of Lucy's adult personality traits are in place. Already acquainted with her native genius, the reader learns about her ‘tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts.’ But it only takes a second for this superficial bravado to crack and expose the vulnerable, lonely girl cowering beneath. ‘I don’t want you to die! I don’t want you to die!’ she sobs, wrapping herself around Scarpetta for all she is worth. Lucy has been reading newspaper reports about Charlotte’s serial killer and saw an accompanying photograph of Scarpetta herself.
Cornwell and Lucy have come a long way over the past twenty- three years, and have often done so in tandem. Both share a love of flying helicopters and driving Ferraris. Both have crashed their sports cars, but thankfully not their helicopters, when under the influence. Both have earned vast sums of money (Lucy in computer software and programming) only to see their fortune dwindle after financial mismanagement. Both are highly intelligent, creative and prone to emotional volatility. Both are openly gay. ‘Someone asked me recently, “Why did you decide to make Lucy gay?” I replied, “I most certainly didn’t.” In fact, I had a big dilemma when I realised she was because I knew I would get in trouble for it.’ Cornwell recalls ‘outing’ Lucy in 1995’s The Body Farm. ‘She walked into the living room. I hadn’t seen her since she was a kid. I went, Oh my god, she is gay. I could sense from her body language that she was gay. I couldn’t tell you what her face looks like, but when I saw her walk in, I just intuited right away.’
Cornwell, who was yet to acknowledge her own sexuality in public, knew this revelation ran the risk of alienating parts of her fanbase, not to mention the neanderthal Pete Marino. ‘I actually called one of my editors and said, “Houston, we have a problem.” He replied, “You don’t do this in popular crime fiction.” Nobody gave me a really terrible time about it, but I was told to be really careful, because it might offend some of my fans.’ Cornwell herself felt she had no choice in the matter. ‘This comes back to the point about truth. I can’t make Lucy something she’s not. That was before there was anything out about me either. It was not the politically astute thing.’
Political astuteness is not a term one would associate with Pete Marino, one of Cornwell’s two leading men. Here is Scarpetta’s first impression of him as described in Postmortem: ‘He was hard to read, and I’d never decided if he was a good poker player or simply slow. He was exactly the sort of detective I avoided when given a choice – a cock of the walk and absolutely unreachable. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his graying pate…Marino was the stuff of tough-guy flicks – a crude, crass gumshoe who probably had a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet and a coffee table littered with Hustler magazines.’ Postmortem and many of Scarpetta’s subsequent cases will both reinforce and disprove this initial assessment. Many of the good graces associated with civilised behaviour do seem absent in the sweaty, overweight detective. Nevertheless, what he lacks in refinement, he makes up for with intuition, courage and decisiveness.
This infuriating mix of smarts and vulgarity was inspired by Cornwell’s encounters with policemen from her days as a crime reporter from the early 1980s. ‘Marino was a composite of detectives I’d ridden with and spent time with going back as early as my years at The Charlotte Observer.’ Charlotte’s intensely macho police force treated the paper's first female crime reporter with disdain bordering on sexual harassment. ‘It was so adversarial that when I went into the duty office, the cops would swivel around in the chairs and turn their backs to me. They would say, “Did somebody hear something in here?” The duty captain would say, “If you want to come sit on my lap, I might tell you some stuff”.’
This sexist bullying bears comparison with Scarpetta’s early encounters with Marino. She eventually earns his respect, however uneasily, in much the same way that Cornwell tamed the sexist policemen in Charlotte: through persistence, charm, and home cooking. ‘Next thing you know, my nickname was “Scoop” because I always got all the stories nobody else did.’
The detente between Scarpetta and Marino, fragile at the best of times, degenerated first when Scarpetta became his employer, and later when she married Wesley. This provoked one the most controversial incidents in Cornwell’s oeuvre. In The Book of the Dead, a drunk, drugged and desperate Marino attempts to rape Scarpetta. At the time of publication, Cornwell explained the assault in these terms: ‘There is no question he was sexually attracted to her, and is in “love-hate” with her. She makes h
im feel small with her power and intellect, even though she doesn’t try to. There is a power struggle. She doesn’t return his feelings and never would. This can’t go on forever with Marino turning into a greater jerk because of his frustration with her. What he’s really doing is committing suicide for the relationship.’
Only Scarpetta, and possibly Cornwell herself, seemed able to forgive Marino: both Benton and Lucy plot revenge, although nothing comes of either plan. ‘One reason you can’t hate Marino after that act is because Scarpetta doesn’t,’ Cornwell said back in 2007. ‘She’s not capable of it. This is not a stranger, this is somebody she has known for seventeen years, and a part of her understands it.’
Admirable as these sentiments are, Scarpetta’s stoicism does beggar belief: the vicious attack seemed to be brushed under the carpet until 2012’s The Bone Bed. Today, Cornwell admits to certain regrets and describes the scene as a last-ditch attempt to reboot the character rather than a carefully considered plot device. ‘In Book of the Dead, I had to shatter Marino to start him all over again. It was either that or kill him off. He’d gotten cornered as a character and I couldn’t deal with him any more. In hindsight, I should have toned down his attack on Scarpetta and his despicable betrayal of her in general. While it says everything about her that she understands why he did what he did, his drunken violent act should not have happened.’
If Lucy is one foil for Marino’s basic instincts, the other is Benton Wesley. From Postmortem onwards, the cultured, reserved and intellectual FBI ‘suspect profiler’ has provided a counterpoint to Marino’s instinctive but crude machismo. The character was again inspired by Cornwell’s first-hand encounters with law enforcement officers. ‘I spent time with a variety of profilers at what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. I used to hang around there quite a lot in the early days of my career.’
Wesley is first seen, once again in Postmortem, reading the Wall Street Journal and lusting after a drink: ‘Some days I’m so desperate I fantasize the water cooler outside my door is full of gin.’ Where Marino provokes, Wesley apologises; where Marino is sardonic, Wesley is gently amused; where Marino is sweaty, overweight and balding, Wesley is elegant, impeccably dressed if forbidding, and where Marino operates on gut feeling, Wesley is methodical and educated: he has a master’s degree in psychology and had worked as a high school principal before he began busting Mafia bosses. Scarpetta’s first description of Wesley sounds a little like autobiography: ‘I’d gradually warmed up to Wesley. The first time I had met him I had my reservations. At a glance, he made one a believer in stereotypes. He was FBI right down to his Florsheim shoes, a sharp-featured man with prematurely silver hair suggesting a mellow disposition that wasn’t there.’
Wesley’s aloof demeanour is no more instructive about his real character than Marino’s boorish surfaces. Indeed, despite his initial formality, he is responsible for two of the series’ most notorious storylines. The first is romantic: Wesley’s marriage, after years of flirtation, to Scarpetta herself. Cornwell accepts that it was a risk to bring the couple together: ‘Writing about couples can be boring unless there is plenty of mystery, friction, passion and pathos. I enjoy having Scarpetta and Benton together. Because of their remarkably intricate and intensely difficult and secretive careers, they have more non-conversations than open ones, and their dance together is unique. I go into quite a lot of detail about this in Dust.’
Wesley’s second contentious narrative arc was his ‘death’ in 1998’s Point of Origin, and subsequent resurrection five years later in Blow Fly. ‘Were I to start the series again, I would certainly match Scarpetta with Benton, but I would not have killed him off and then been faced with figuring out if he really was dead. While it’s worked out all right, it wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.’ Why did she do it? ‘I don’t know,’ Cornwell replies. ‘When I was writing Point of Origin I began to sense something awful was going to happen to Benton. I didn’t premeditate his alleged murder. That is the way my books seem to work. The stories tell themselves and I let the characters lead the way. Obviously, on some level I’m making decisions, and not always perfect ones.’ As with Marino’s attempted rape of Scarpetta, Benton’s demise freed a plot impasse. ‘I was feeling that their relationship was an obstruction and not going anywhere. In the next few books I realized how lonely Scarpetta was without him – that something was missing. She is better balanced and more interesting when he’s around – just as she needs Marino and Lucy. Plus my fans were outraged and I felt I had to bring him back for them, too.’
Whether planned or expedient, successful or regretted, such sensational and cleansing plot twists are inevitable for any long-running series, no matter how successful: you only have to recall Sherlock Holmes’ plunge over the aptly named Reichenbach Falls in Arthur Conan Doyle’s inaptly named ‘The Final Solution’. Cornwell may repent some of her more baroque storylines, but, she argues, these warts-and-all developments are not just the stuff of serial fiction – they hint at the stuff of life itself.
‘Characters grow and transition just as people do. Benton is more flexible and warm-blooded, and more proactive. Marino isn’t as bigoted, for sure, and he’s becoming more enlightened. I think the characters are more self-possessed and independent. Lucy is more mature, although no less accomplished and fierce. While they definitely constitute an ensemble, they are no longer extensions of Scarpetta’s life and world. Each of them could be the main character in a series.’
In much the same way that Patricia Cornwell today is both recognisable as the person who wrote Postmortem back in 1989 and also different from her, so Scarpetta, Farinelli, Marino and Wesley are the same, and fundamentally changed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Even dependable Scarpetta isn’t exempt from growth. ‘Scarpetta is less regimented. She doesn’t just solve cases by following procedures; she gets the job done no matter what. I find her bolder, more emotional and less inhibited than she used to be. I feel very good about the way she has evolved, and I think you see a very commanding Scarpetta in Dust. She takes offense at corruption in government and sets about to destroy the official involved. She admits she wants him destroyed, and that’s a side of her we’ve not really seen in the past. She doesn’t break the law. She doesn’t need to.’
As for the future, Cornwell has no idea where Scarpetta, Farinelli, Marino and Wesley are headed. ‘Having characters is like having children. At times I don’t handle them perfectly or lead them along the right path. Then there are those other times when they don’t listen to me.’ Whatever happens, Cornwell is determined to keep pushing forward. She may have come to terms with the restlessness from her childhood, but that doesn’t mean it has vanished entirely.
‘You have to shift gears. I work really hard and I refuse to sit on my laurels. If other people want to do the same things I am doing, they are always going to be one book behind me. I will already have moved on to something else. That is the competitor in me. I will keep running to the next thing. What can I explore in this next book that puts me in a place that most people don’t go? I am going to show you something different. That’s really been my mantra from day one. Now it just takes me in different areas than it used to.’
James Kidd
Table of Contents
Also by Patricia Cornwell
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
Epigraph
1: C ambridge, M assachusetts W ednesday, D ecember 19 4:02 a.m.
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3: T en years earlier R ichmond, V irginia
4: C ambridge, M assachusetts W ednesday, D ecember 19 4:48 a.m.
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44: F ive days later M iami, F lorida
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Profile of Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell, Dust
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